


Odysseus, American

by coyotesuspect



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Americana, Classics, Phone Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-18
Updated: 2010-02-18
Packaged: 2017-11-29 03:08:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/682027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coyotesuspect/pseuds/coyotesuspect
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean finds Peter O'Toole's recording of the Odyssey in a bin marked “Audio" in Casa Grande's only used bookstore. The place smells like cigarette smoke and old books, and it reminds him of Sam. Stanford era.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Odysseus, American

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story  
of that man skilled in all the ways of contending,  
the wanderer

i. how he is brave

Dean spends three weeks wandering the desert. 

He’s looking for a chupacabra, and the damn thing’s tricky. It has a nasty habit of doubling back on him. A string of livestock winds up dead to the west of him just as he thought he’d driven it east into New Mexico. 

He’s not particularly concerned by it though, mostly just annoyed. Dad said he’d start letting Dean handle his own cases, and Dean had hoped that would’ve meant more than just chasing after goatkillers. 

It’s high summer, and the Impala shimmers like a mirage, like a distant promise. The heat settles over everything like a blanket. It’s honey thick and makes him move honey slow when he’s outside. It’s as if Hell is blazing just beneath the dusty, parched earth, the heat pressing up against the soles of his feet as he interviews one farmer after another. A few of them have seen something- and the details tend to vary- but enough to confirm Dean’s initial belief.

The towns out here are like islands. They rise suddenly and disappear just as quickly, most of them just a cluster of houses around a gas station-slash-convenience mart. Dean sees more cacti most days than he does people. He camps out a couple nights, when he thinks he’s getting close to the thing. There are more stars than there is sky, and out there, at the edge of everything, Dean can’t help but feel alone. 

During the day, his skin burns and peels, then freckles over. His left arm becomes tanner than his right, sunbrowned from all the times he’s left it hanging out the window. He gets bored. There’s no one to talk to, and even though John calls every few days to check on how he’s doing, his father’s gruff, terse questions over the phone hardly qualify as conversation. Not that John was saying much before. The months after Sam left are twilight-dim in Dean’s memory, one case blurring into another and neither him nor John willing to talk. Dean still isn’t sure who he blames more- Sam for running off, or John for chasing him off. 

It’s been months since he’s talked to Sam; his absence is an injury that never quite healed right, the pain constant and nagging and dull, flaring up occasionally to burst bright and jagged across Dean’s consciousness. 

His family is coming apart. He always thought their quest would be enough to bind them together, inexorable and irresistible as gravity. But everyone’s shuttling off, leaving him to follow his own shadow through the dusty southwest. 

Once he starts thinking like that, he figures he needs something to distract him during the drives. He loves his tapes, but they’re too familiar. Sing along to them loud as he likes, they don’t do the trick anymore. Besides, he’s skipped over _Going to California_ on Zeppelin IV enough times that he’s worried he might have done permanent damage to the tape. 

He finds his distraction in a bin marked “Audio” in the back of a used bookstore in Casa Grande. The place smells like cigarette smoke and old books and it reminds him of Sam. 

It's an audio book of the Odyssey, read by Peter O’Toole. Dean likes the art on the box- three half naked women sitting on an island of rocks and skulls, a slender boat in the background cresting on a dark purple wave. 

The woman who rings up his purchase is cotton-haired, her skin tan and wrinkled from the desert sun. She smiles at him with yellowed teeth and doesn’t know anything about the livestock disappearances that have hit the area the past week or so. Dean thanks her politely and goes on his way.

He doesn’t get very far into the Odyssey. The invocation, the first book, Telemachus adrift in his own home, child of a distant father. Yeah, Dean can relate, but it’s not exactly gripping. He entertains himself by casting the characters. Athena’s Angelina, hot, but she’d probably stab you as soon as look at you. And Penelope’s Demi Moore. Getting up there in age, but still a stone-cold fox.

Then he gets to Freeman, and he learns that a little girl’s gone missing. 

It’s not unheard of for a chupacabra to turn, but it’s not common either. They get cocky sometimes or an opportunity presents itself. From what Dean can find out, it was probably the latter this time. Guadalupe Cisneros was playing outside, didn’t come in when her older sister called her for dinner.

The sister, Sandra, is practically catatonic. She was supposed to be babysitting Lupe when she disappeared, and blames herself. As far as Dean can tell, she didn’t see anything. 

He promises to find her sister though, and Sandra presses his hand tight and breathes, “Gracias, gracias.”

Dean leaves the Impala parked about a mile off a tiny gravel-track that calls itself a highway on the map. He hates to do it- and he hates what the sand is doing to his baby- but it’s easier to track a chupacabra on foot. 

There’s not much left of Guadalupe when he finds her. He’s been hiking for a couple hours when the reek of death slips familiar across his path. She’s lying about ten yards away in a dry creek bed, a crumpled heap of bloody, mangled bones, the flesh still clinging to some of them. There’s nothing even recognizably human about the remains, and the only reason he knows it’s her is the pink tennis shoe that lies, overturned, next to the body.

He sits down then, a few feet away, on one of the desert’s wide, granite rocks and avoids looking at the mess of a person that was left behind.

He hears a loud, rattling hiss behind him, and stands and turns. It’s the chupacabra, probably come to finish what was left of Guadalupe.

Or maybe it never left, thinks Dean. He wonders if he’d just been a little faster, if he would have been able to save her.

The chupacabra skitters at him. It has wide, lamplike eyes that take up most of its face. It’s large for its kind, maybe five feet when standing on its hind legs, like it is now, and looks like the ugly bastard child of a monkey and a dog. 

It leaps at Dean, teeth bared and mouth foaming.

He rolls away and does it badly, grimacing as he bangs up his shoulder. He ignores the pain and rises to his knees, whips out one gun and levels it at the monster.

Chupcabras, at least, are easy to kill. Pump it full of enough lead, and it’ll go down same as a man will. The chupacabra scurries toward him, hissing and spitting. Dean levels his baretta and fires in quick succession. Three bullets lodge into the thing’s brainpan, and it drops, viscous black blood leaking out onto the earth. 

Dean staggers to his feet. He’ll have to burn the monster, and then call the police to report that he’s found a body- _Gaudalupe Cisneros’ body_ \- out in the scrub that surrounds the town. 

He doesn’t stick around after making the call, just hikes his way back to his car and drives. It’ll be someone else’s responsibility to tell the Cisneroses what happened. He doesn’t let himself think. The adrenaline wore off on the hike back, but the hike also left him tired, so he rides the exhaustion into numbness, keeps driving until it gets dark and then gets darker. 

Dean’s in the middle of nowhere when he finally pulls over. He keeps blinking, and, when he opens his eyes, finds more time’s passed than he thought, that he’s drifted over into the next lane. There’s no one around, so it’s not like he’s endangering other people, but he has a well enough developed sense of preservation to not want to crash and kill himself because he’s nodded off.

He turns off the ignition and climbs into the backseat, kicking off his boots as he does so. Dean’s slept in the car before. He doesn’t really mind. It’s cramped, but he prefers to think of it as cozy. He stares up at the ceiling for about three minutes before he digs his cell phone out of his pocket. Now that he’s stopped, he finds he’s not yet willing to sleep. 

He calls Sam, and Sam- miraculously- picks up. 

“Dean?” says Sam, sounding bitchy but wide-awake. “What the hell, man? It’s two in the morning.”

“Clearly you’re awake,” says Dean. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have answered. Are you nocturnal now? Sleep through all the times I call you during the day?”

Sam’s silent for a moment; then he sighs. It’s a familiar sound to Dean, though not one he’s heard going on a year now. Exasperated, annoyed, _my brother is an idiot_ kind of sigh.

It makes Dean smile to hear it. 

“I have a midterm tomorrow,” says Sam. “And you never call this late. I was…”

He doesn’t say worried, but Dean hears it anyway. “Midterm?” he scoffs. “Dude, it’s July.”

“And I’m taking summer classes,” says Sam dryly, as if it were obvious. “What did you think I was going to do this summer?”

Dean had hoped he would come home, let Dean and John pick him up at Stanford. Dean doesn’t think he’d mind this college thing so much if he at least got to see Sam a few months out of every twelve, instead of never at all. 

“Yeah, well,” he says gruffly. “It’s not like you go out of your way to keep me informed.”

“Dean, you did not call me at two in the morning to bitch me out for never calling,” says Sam, disbelief rising in his voice. “I’m gonna hang up.” 

Dean wants to tell him _No, stay on the phone, I just want to know you’re all right_. He wants to say _a little girl died today and I think it might be my fault._ But he’s not that much of a wimp. 

“Take care of yourself, Sam,” he says instead, and he hangs up on Sam before Sam has the chance to do it to him. 

He wakes up the next morning feeling stiff and cold. He drove north, and the temperature dropped as the elevation rose. He thinks about seeing the Grand Canyon. He’s spent close to a month in this damnable state; he deserves it. He’s probably not far from it either. But John calls him while he’s brushing his teeth on the side of the road, tells him about a possible haunting in San Antonio and then asks if he’s finally tracked down that chupacabra.

“If I’d known you’d have this much trouble…” growls John.

“It’s taken care of, sir,” says Dean quickly. “I’ll be in San Antonio in a couple days.” He doesn’t elaborate, and John doesn’t ask him to. Dean puts Arizona in the rearview mirror behind him. 

He doesn’t really want to see the Grand Canyon alone, anyway.

The sun is dead center in the sky by the time Dean realizes he’s been driving in silence all day. He switches on the tape player and it takes him a moment to figure out why it’s talking instead of singing. Memory snaps into place then, and the words start making sense. O’Toole’s voice rolls over him, steady and deep as an undertow, pulling him straight into the story.

He drives through the Cyclops and the Sirens and blind Tiresias, through Odysseus’s defeat of the suitors, his triumphant return home. 

It’s past twelve by the time he drives into Lubbock and the final tape clicks to a halt. Dean realizes with a start and a growl of his stomach that he hasn’t eaten all day. He finds an all night diner across from a motel with a vacancy sign, and eats soggy fries and a lukewarm burger in the harsh glare of the fluorescent lights. He’s still caught up in the story. It’s something easier to think about than everything else that’s going on in his life. When he finally staggers into the motel room and passes out, he pretends it’s a day spent on a ship and not a day spent driving that makes it seem like his body is still in motion.

He buys a copy of the Odyssey the next day. It’s another used bookstore, and the cover of the book is plain. Just a ship on the sea. He can’t read it while he’s driving, but he reads it in the evening. He’s curious about what he missed listening; it’s an easy enough way to pass the time between dinner and the time the bars open. 

The pages are thin and slippery, browned with age. There are markings in the margin, most of them in pencil and too faded to read. Probably a college student, Dean thinks. He wonders if Sam’s had to read the book for some class, what he might have written in the margins. 

Dean doesn’t write anything. He doesn’t have anything to say. It’s not a case, just a story. 

He makes one mark though. Digs out a black ballpoint pen that he bought in a pack of twenty at a dollar store. It’s just a line, but part of him feels guilty about marking up a book. He doesn’t have the same reverence for the things that Sam does, but he does kind of respect them. 

_For rarely are sons similar to their fathers_ , he underlines, _most are worse_. 

ii. how he is shrewd

He uses a picture of Sam as a bookmark. It’s one of the few photos of Sam that he has; their childhood is recorded more in scars and the Impala’s ever upward ticking mileage than in Polaroid and film. The picture’s from the July the summer before Sam left, a year ago now. Sam had bought a cheap Kodak disposable camera with a mumbled excuse about using it to remember stuff with.

Dean hadn’t been sure at the time what Sam was going to need to remember. The only change happening in their lives was that now that Sam was out of school, they’d have even less ties to a place. They’d be able to cover more ground, save more lives, and Dean had it constructed it exactly in his mind- a perfect family hunting unit.

Dean stole the camera from him one day when they’d been at a river. John had left them on their own for a few days, off working a case a couple counties over. The camera was lying forgotten in a pile with their t-shirts, and Dean took the picture on the sly. Sam had just gotten out of the water and was sitting on a rock, his hair clinging to his head and his chest bare. He was in profile. Face tilted up, eyes closed, smiling.

It’s a good picture. 

“Did you take this one?” Sam asked after he got the photos developed. He held the photo with two fingers, his nose wrinkled.

“I was bored,” snapped Dean defensively, snatching the picture away. And then, driven by curiosity, “What about the ones you took? Cuz they’re all great art, right?”

Sam looked sideways, and shuffled slightly away, holding the packet of developed photos behind his back. Dean feinted right, and when Sam moved to block, darted left and forward, grabbing the pack from Sam’s hand, his momentum propelling him into the next room. 

He poured the photos out onto the coffee table, ignoring Sam’s bellow of, “Dean!” behind him. 

It took a moment for Dean to realize that all the pictures were of him. 

~~~~~

He and John meet up not long after he finishes reading the Odyssey to work a poltergeist case together. It’s pretty cut and dried, nothing too memorable about it, but the oldest daughter of the unlucky family is working on college applications. John mentions with pride that “My younger boy, Sam, he goes to Stanford.” The daughter goes moon-eyed at that, and the father, already respectful, becomes practically deferential.

Dad keeps bringing it up after that- “Sammy had a 4.0 GPA all through high school, was on his school’s soccer team, too.” He doesn’t mention that Sam was on three different schools’ soccer teams, didn’t join more because a run in with banshee had his leg in a cast for half his junior year. 

Jerry, the father, remarks on John’s obvious pride. And Dean just wants to shake his dad, yell at him for not showing this pride sooner, say it’s all his fault that Sam ran off, that he refuses to come back.

But Dean’s already lost half his family; he has no intention of losing the rest. He keeps quiet. 

The poltergeist overturns a bookcase in the living room onto Dean, right before John finally blasts the damn thing with one of the new rocksalt bullets Dean dreamed up. In the process of digging himself out, Dean finds a copy of the Odyssey. It’s a different translation, and a nicer copy, hardback with a green cover, the word Odyssey embossed on the side in neat gold lettering.

He pockets it. It’s not like he ever asks for any kind of compensation, and, besides, this copy looks like it was bought and never read; the Odyssey is the kind of book you’re _supposed_ to have sitting on your bookshelf, next to The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and lurking behind some school pictures of the kids.

~~~~~

“They’re all of me,” Dean had said, stunned, after pouring the pictures onto the coffee table. 

There was a picture of him doing the dishes, head bowed over the sink, his shoulders a broad, straight line. From the angle, Dean could tell that Sam had been seated at the dining room table when he took it. There was another, taken in profile, of Dean cleaning the guns, eyes lowered and brow furrowed in concentration. In a third picture, Dean was asleep, passed out on the couch, with his arms folded over his chest and his boots on the headrest. It was odd to see himself asleep; he looked peaceful.

Sam stood in the doorway, eyes wide and terrified but his jaw held tightly, defiantly. He nodded and didn’t say anything, then strode across the room in a few steps. He kneeled down on the opposite side of the coffee table from Dean and began gathering the photos up. His fingers brushed against Dean’s hand, and they both jerked away, looking shocked. 

Sam shook his head slightly and began picking up the photos again; his face was slightly red. 

Dean reached out and trapped Sam’s hand beneath his own. 

“Sam,” he said. “I… _Why?_ ”

Sam stared up at him furiously. 

“It doesn’t matter,” he hissed, trying to jerk his hand out of Dean’s grasp. Dean held onto it tightly. 

“Sam,” was all Dean said. It seemed like it was the only word he knew. Sam frowned, and lowered his gaze back to the coffee table. It made his eyelashes stand out prominently, a dark, sweeping curve against his cheek.

For a moment, Dean didn’t see his kid brother, gawky and coltish. He saw Sam’s mouth, his high cheekbones and dark curls, his lean body. It was an experience that had been happening with increasing frequency, leaving him momentarily thoughtless and breathless. Sam was becoming an adult, someone he could no longer take for granted, a constant, bright figure in his life, the fact of him as obvious and necessary as sunlight.

Dean let go of Sam’s hand. Sam didn’t snatch it away; he lifted it slightly and reached toward Dean, as if he were going to touch Dean’s face. He didn’t. His hand hovered between them, like a physical manifestation of the tension that hung in the air. Dean was torn between wanting Sam to close the final distance and wanting him to drop his hand. 

It was the kind of moment, Dean knew, in which no matter what happened, their lives would be different after. It was only the shape and color of that difference that was left to be decided. 

Sam lowered his hand.

“I’m leaving in a couple months, Dean,” he said slowly, tortuously. The words sounded like they were coming from very far away, like Sam wasn’t actually saying them. “I’m going to college. Stanford accepted me.” 

He held up the stack of photos dejectedly. “That’s why I took these. You’re what I want to remember.”

iii. how he is faithful

If the roads and railways of America are its veins and arteries, unfurling across all the country’s varied landscape, then Chicago is its heart. It pulses in the center of it all, violent and vibrant. Dean’s in the city in late March, hunting for a succubus. Six men have died in the past two weeks, and Dean gets in town in time to try for lucky number seven.

He’s in the bar three of the previous men disappeared from, nursing his second beer and keeping an eye on the crowd. Succubi go after men with a lot of pent up sexual frustration, take the appearance of whatever it is you desire most. So Dean hasn’t slept with anyone in a whole week and a half, and he’s grumpy enough for it that he’ll take killing something as a substitute for sex. He’s also got his eye out for any hot brunettes; even Dean Winchester has a type. 

That’s why it takes him completely unaware when a familiar, shocked voice says, “ _Dean?_ ” about two feet to his right.

He nearly falls over when he sees who it is. 

“Sam!” he says, turning his flail into a smooth slide off the barstool. “Jesus Christ, what are you doing here?”

“Spring break,” says Sam with a broad smile. He looks good, a little taller and more filled out than he was before he left, his hair curling around his ears. He thumps Dean on the shoulder, a friendly greeting. But his hand stays there, palm spreading over Dean’s chest. “What about you? Working a case with Dad?”

“Working a case, yeah, but not with Dad,” says Dean, but he’s having trouble remembering what the case was. His mind feels adrift, his body loose and light. He’s stupid and high happy, like his brain’s just been pumped full of the good kind of chemicals. 

It’s odd. He hasn’t had that much to drink. 

“Dad’s letting you work cases on your own?” asks Sam, eyebrows rising.

“Dude, I’m twenty-five,” says Dean scornfully. He narrows his eyes, “And what are you doing in here anyway? You don’t turn twenty-one for another couple months.”

Sam smirks, a familiar twist of his lips, eyes lighting up. “Like I forgot everything you and Dad taught me.” He looks around, seems suddenly shy, and when he looks back at Dean, his smirk’s been replaced by a soft smile. “Look, my friends disappeared awhile ago. You wanna get out of here?” 

“Yeah!” says Dean. “Of course.” He’s smiling so wide, and been smiling for so long, that it’s beginning to hurt his face. But he doesn’t care. Of all the bars in the world, his little brother’s shown up in this one. “I was just…” His mind fumbles, goes blank. He was doing something. Can’t remember what.

“Well, whatever it was, it can’t be that important, right?” asks Sam. His hand’s on the small of Dean’s back as he pushes Dean toward the door. It’s a bright point of contact, runs a line of heat straight up his spine and bursts electrical in his brain. “Otherwise you would’ve remembered it, right?”

“Yeah,” agrees Dean amiably. They get outside, the air cool and wet from the spring rainstorm that had blown through all fury earlier in the day. It’s still overcast, the clouds reflecting dirty orange light back at them, but it’s not raining. Sam doesn’t move his hand, and Dean leads him to the car. 

“So how’s California?” he asks, once they get to the Impala. Sam hovers behind him. Dean’s chest feels flooded with heat. His mouth is dry. “I mean, I’m sure you miss me, but at least the chicks are hot, right?”

He turns around. Sam’s right up against him. Too close, Dean thinks, entirely too close. 

“It’s all right,” says Sam, eyes pinned to Dean’s face. He’s smiling slightly, edges of his mouth turned up. “But, yeah, I miss you.”

Dean swallows and attempts a cocky grin. “Not surprising. I’m hard not to miss.”

“You still talk too much,” chuckles Sam. His voice has gone low, a deep rumble through his chest that Dean can feel, pressed as tight as he is against his brother. 

“So you’re gonna make me stop?” challenges Dean, and the cocky smile comes more naturally now. 

His heart’s gone jackhammer loud and fast, but he can do this. This is just Sam.

Sam kisses him, hard and brutal, and Dean arches into it. He fists his hands in Sam’s jacket. There’s a lot of teeth, the slide of tongue, and Dean’s getting hard already. Sam runs his hands up Dean’s sides, bites at his lower lip. 

Dean swears and pulls away, wards off Sam with a hand pushed against his chest. 

“Back of the car,” he pants. His blood is thrumming, a swift staccato in his veins. 

Sam smiles at him, all white teeth in the night. He pushes past Dean to get in the car, pulls his shirt and jacket off as he goes. 

Dean, for a moment, stands swaying in the parking lot. Secretly, sometimes, he blames himself for being the reason Sam left. The closest they ever came to this was the time with the photos, but Dean would be lying if he said he hadn’t _wanted_ even before that. He thinks sometimes, in his worse moments, that it’s the reason Sam ran away. Dean lost Sam because he wanted too much of him.

But Sam is here. Now. 

He follows Sam into the car. 

He pauses again once inside. His head aches, a dull, insistent pounding behind his eyes that makes it hard to think. But something’s sitting uneasy in his chest. He was doing something, he remembers. Something important. A hunt, maybe. 

“Dean!” snaps Sam, a high whine to his voice that immediately snags Dean’s attention. 

Dean looks at his brother. Sam’s sprawled on the backseat, naked from the waist up. He’s long lines and hard muscle, but Dean can still see the lean teenage boy he was. His head is tilted back, throat bared. It’s suddenly hard for Dean to breathe, a hot, tight feeling suffocating him. 

He climbs over the divide and into the backseat. He’s slept with girls back here before, but Sam’s a lot larger than any girl. It’s a close fit. Dean wedges himself in between Sam’s legs and wastes no time in getting his hands back on Sam’s body. Sam kisses him eagerly, and they thrust against each other.

Sam turns his face away, and Dean’s mouth is suddenly on Sam’s jaw. He can work with that. He traces his lips along the line of Sam’s jaw, feels Sam shiver beneath him.

“You’re wearing too many layers,” gasps Sam into Dean’s neck. He clenches his hands in Dean’s jacket and nips at Dean’s neck at the same time. Dean hisses with pleasure-pain at that and draws back slightly. He throws his jacket off and then works on the buttons of his front shirt. Sam doesn’t do anything to help, just gets his hands on the skin of Dean’s stomach as soon as he sees it.

Sam’s hands are large and slightly rough, but still softer than Dean’s, his calluses worn down from lack of use. Sam runs his hands up Dean’s sides, almost reverentially, and Dean suppresses a groan. 

Sam arches forward and kisses him again, tongue sliding into his mouth. They just kiss for a minute, soft, wet noises in the dark. And then Sam starts moving, an undulating slide and roll of his hips that causes white light to start bursting behind Dean’s eyes. 

“Jesus Christ, Sammy,” he says, breaking the kiss. His voice sounds shredded even to his own ears. “Where’d you learn to move like that?”

Sam smiles at him, cheeks dimpled, his lips red and swollen from all the kissing. “You learn a lot of things in college, Dean,” he says. 

Dean sneers at that, and a sick, dark part inside him rages at the implication that his brother has done this with other people. He wants to mark Sam as his. Blood and history should already make it obvious, but apparently even Sam didn’t know that well enough not to run away.

He shoves his hand in between them, yanking down the fly of Sam’s pants in a swift motion. Sam grimaces in pain and Dean ignores it. He palms Sam through his boxers, and the grimace turns into a moan of pleasure. 

Dean pauses to look at Sam. His mouth is half open, eyes closed, his head tilted back; he’s all shadows in the darkness, except for where fuzzy light from a nearby streetlamp shines through the fogged windows, illuminates his face.

“Jesus, Dean, I don’t have all night,” says Sam, breaking through Dean’s thoughts, eyelashes fluttering open. He shoves his hand between them as well. He tugs down Dean’s fly, more gentle than Dean was and pulls him out. “Besides,” he adds, grinning wickedly, voice dropping low. “I want to bend you over the dresser later.”

He squeezes Dean hard and tight as he speaks, and the combination has Dean gasping, all the breath expelled from his lungs as totally as the thoughts are from his head. Sam smirks at him, and then begins to tug on Dean’s cock. 

Dean starts back up too; they work in unison. Dean’s getting close, caught on the bright edge of pleasure. He feels the orgasm building, gets ready to ride it through, and then Sam smiles. 

Something’s wrong. Sam’s teeth don’t look right. It’s an odd thing to think; Dean almost brushes it off. But the observation nags at him, the sense of unease he had before creeps back in. Sam’s teeth are too long, look sharp.

“Sam?” he says, kind of stupidly, pulling away.

Sam looks at him, eyes round. But it’s not Sam. He’s going fuzzy around the edges, like the body doesn’t fit right. Dean realizes that Sam’s hands, spread wide and possessive on Dean’s thighs, have long, sharp nails on them, equal to his teeth. 

_As the victim comes closer to climax_ , Dean remembers reading when he reviewed his notes on the case, _the succubus begins to reveal its true form._

The fog lifts.

“Dean,” says the succubus. Its voice doesn’t even sound like Sam’s now; the tenor is off. It slides one claw up Dean’s thigh, and Dean shudders with revulsion this time. He kicks away, and the succubus hunches back toward the door. It looks hurt. And that gives Dean pause. It still has Sam’s face, has his kicked-puppy look down perfectly, the eyes wide and soft beneath drawn over eyebrows, the downward shape of the mouth.

And then Dean sees that the thing’s pupils are slit. He pulls out the silver knife he has in his boot and shoves it into the succubus’ chest. It’s eyes go wide, slit-pupil expanding and contracting. And then it explodes in a shower of red blood and a billow of dark smoke, a high-pitched shriek and it’s gone.

Dean sits up slowly. Even “Sam’s” discarded shirt and jacket have disappeared.

He breathes in deep and shaky, concentrates only on that for a moment. Tells himself he didn’t just kill a thing that looked just like his brother.

Didn’t just try to sleep with it either. 

He presses his forehead against the cool leather of the front seat. He’s still hard. He grips himself tight and jerks off with slow, steady strokes. He doesn’t think of anything at all.

~~~~~

Chicago has a million used bookstores, same as any big city. He gets another copy of the Odyssey at Powell’s, finds himself lost for a few minutes or fifteen as he wanders through the stacks. There’s something intimidatingly mazelike about the place. But he finds the Classics section eventually, and gets a translation in prose.

He’s not sure if he likes the difference. He likes the rhythm that comes with it when the translation is in poetry, but prose is more what he’s used to. It reads different, at any rate. 

It hits him this time though that Odysseus only spends three years wandering. The rest of the ten years, he’s stuck on an island with Calypso, but almost all of that is passed over in a few lines. There’s nothing to say about someone in stasis.

Dean can think of worse fates than being stuck on an island with a hot and horny nymph, but Odysseus is apparently not a fan, too wrapped up in what- his wife? His kid? _Ithaca_? 

Dean’s not really sure why any place would be so important to anyone.

iv. how he is long-suffering 

He calls Sam more often than he’s willing to admit. Sam never picks up, and Dean spends a lot of time listening to the sunny California warmth of Sam’s voice as he prompts Dean to, “uh, leave your name and number and I’ll get back to you.”

“Hey,” Dean’ll say. “This is,” and he’ll leave a name though never _his_ name; Sam knows who he is, “just checking up on you.”

Dean spends a lot of time coming up with names for when he calls Sam. Names of presidents and the real names of rock stars, then he goes through a whole string of names from the Odyssey. Dean figures he butchers them, but picturing Sam grimacing as he listens to Dean’s awful pronunciation makes him laugh.

This is figuring, of course, that Sam actually listens to the messages Dean leaves. 

He doesn’t call Sam for a couple weeks, is tracking a couple of harpies through the woods in Wisconsin and can’t get a damn cell signal anywhere. Not that it really matters; John knows where he is. If he doesn’t hear from Dean in a few more weeks, he’ll figure something is up and come looking.

But once Dean is out of the woods and back into something resembling civilization, in a motel room with a warm meal inside him, he checks his cell and sees four missed calls. 

They’re all from Sam. 

He calls Sam back immediately, visions of his brother in the hospital, in jail, in some kind of awful trouble, and Sam picks up almost as soon as Dean finishes pressing ‘1’ on his speed dial.

“Jesus Christ, Dean,” breathes Sam furiously. “Where have you been?”

Dean wonders, for a moment, if while stuck in the woods he somehow managed to wander into some kind of alternate universe where Sam waits for him to call. 

“I was on a hunt,” he says slowly. “I didn’t have a cell phone service.”

“You hadn’t called in awhile,” says Sam. He still sounds angry. “You could have been dead.”

“Why do you care if I call?” asks Dean dumbly. “You never pick up.”

“Yeah,” says Sam softly. He doesn’t apologize or explain. 

Dean sits down on the motel bed. 

“So,” he says. He’s desperate to keep Sam on the line. It’s the first time he’s actually talked to his brother in over a year. “How are things?”

“They’re good,” says Sam carefully. “I’m good. School’s, uh, good.”

“Good,” says Dean in response. He clears his throat. “I’m glad to hear everything’s…good. So, uh…” he searches for some possible topic to discuss, hates that the person most important to him is someone he can’t even have a simple conversation with. “How about girls?” he settles on finally. “Got a girlfriend? A boyfriend?”

“Fuck you,” laughs Sam. He pauses, “Yeah. Maybe.” There’s another pause, and then Sam continues, sounding slightly embarrassed. “There’s this girl; we’ve gone out a couple times. And I think…” he trails off, but there’s a tentatively optimistic ring to his voice.

“Good,” says Dean, and he immediately feels like an idiot. He lies down on his bed and closes his eyes. It’s nice to just hear the sound of Sam breathing on the other end. “What does she look like?”

He can almost see Sam rolling his eyes. “Tall, blonde. Pretty.”

It’s not a lot to go on, but Dean can picture her vividly, some California beach babe with soft curves and hair the color of sunlight. Then another image flashes through his mind, just as vivid- Sam kissing the girl, his large hands spread around her waist. The Sam in his fantasy is naked from the waist up; the muscles in his back flex and shift as he deepens the kiss, moves his hands lower on the nameless girl’s body.

Dean’s breath hitches and his own hand moves, almost of its own accord, upward along his thigh.

“Dude!” says Sam, sounding scandalized at the shift in Dean's breathing. “Are you watching porn?”

Dean knows the smart thing to do now would be to lie. 

“No,” he says. His voice is husky.

There’s a pause, and then Sam says simply, “Oh.”

“I should… go,” says Dean lamely, unable to come up with any kind of excuse.

“No,” says Sam quickly. “Stay. Are you really…”

Dean licks his lips; they’re suddenly dry. 

“Yeah,” he says. He hears Sam let out a short huff of disbelief. He’s not sure if it’s because Sam doesn’t believe him, or if because Sam doesn’t believe the situation they’re in.

“Are you alone?” asks Sam. His voice has dropped low, tinged with a morbid fascination.

Dean opens his eyes and stares at the ceiling. A car passes through the parking lot, throwing the room into light and Dean gets a brief glimpse of a water stain on the ceiling. It looks like some state whose name he can’t remember. He’s sure he’s driven through it all the same.

“Yeah.” He closes his eyes again. “Are you?”

“Yes,” says Sam. “I’m in my room.”

“What are you doing?” asks Dean.

“Nothing,” says Sam. There’s a beat of silence. “I’m just sitting on my bed, talking to you.”

Dean nods, despite the fact that Sam can’t see it, and his hands slides higher up on his thigh. The calluses of his palm rasp against the denim of the jeans. He has no idea what to say next. He’s done this before, with girls he said were his girlfriend but who he never called again after leaving town. But this is Sam; Sam who is skittish and his brother. 

Thankfully, Sam takes over. 

“So you’re,” Sam sucks in a breath. “You’ve got a hand on your…”

“Yeah,” says Dean. “How about you? Got your hand in your boxers?” he asks. He smirks, more for his own benefit than out of any actual sense of amusement. He’s damned, he thinks to himself. This is his damning moment. He should hang up. He doesn’t hang up. “You getting hard, Sammy, thinking about me whacking off?”

He hears a hiss of indrawn breath and then Sam says, “Yeah. I’m getting there.”

“How do you like it?” asks Dean. His heart is doing eighty-ninety-a hundred miles per hour in his chest, screaming past all the speed limit signs. "Slow? Rough? What?"

“Rough,” admits Sam. “Hard.” 

“Stroke it slowly then,” orders Dean. “Draw it out.”

Sam snorts and Dean hears him shifting around on his bed. 

“All right,” he says. There’s a slight tremor in his voice. “I’m doing it. What about you? What are you doing?”

Dean ignores the questions. His own cock is pressing hard against his jeans. He undoes the button and unzips with one hand. His dick immediately pokes out, tip already red and leaking.

“How’s it feel?” he asks. He presses his palm against his cock but doesn’t begin stroking. The pressure is enough for now.

“Feels good,” says Sam, slurring the words slightly. 

“Now close your eyes,” Dean says. “Imagine I’m the one touching you like that.”

There’s a hitch in Sam’s breathing that makes Dean stiffen even more. 

“Okay,” says Sam. “I’m-” his breath catches again- “doing that.”

Dean grips himself tight then, begins jerking off in slow strokes that he imagines match Sam’s own.

“What do you think about usually?” he demands. “When you’re jerking off?”

“Girls,” says Sam instantly. “You,” he blurts, a second later. “I think about you a lot.” He laughs, short and humorless and adds, almost as an aside. “Have since I was sixteen.”

Dean sucks in a sharp breath. “What do you think about me?” he asks. 

“Your mouth,” says Sam. “I think about your mouth. I think about you sucking me off.”

Dean’s strokes become increasingly erratic. “Is that what you want, Sam?” he asks. “Me on my knees getting you off? And then what happens?” He lowers his voice. “Would you let me fuck you?”

There is the smallest of pauses, stretching taut between them.

“ _Yes_ ,” breathes Sam. 

Dean shudders. “Jesus Christ,” he says. He’s on the edge, he realizes. They both are.

“Speed up,” he barks. “Harder.”

Sam moans then. The sound runs straight through Dean. He jacks himself furiously, thrusting into his own hand. Two thousand miles away, he thinks, Sam is doing the same. Dean closes his eyes, pictures Sam on his bed, hand moving swiftly between his legs, lower lip caught between his teeth, getting off on the sound of his brother’s voice.

Dean’s orgasm builds inside him. The blood rushing through him reaches the sound of a roar.

“Sam,” he gasps. He says it like a curse, Sam, his brother, Sam, who got up and left and took all the best parts of Dean with him. 

He hears Sam come with a wordless yell, and he follows a few seconds later, everything bursting out at once, leaving him feeling hollowed out and stranded.

The roar in Dean’s ear subsides slowly until there’s nothing but the sound of his thick, heavy breathing, of Sam echoing the sound.

“Look, Dean. I have a – a- thing,” says Sam, after the silence blooms and dies between them. 

There’s still a faint tremor in his voice. “I should probably get going…”

Dean doesn’t remind Sam that fifteen minutes ago, he was planning on going to sleep. But he does want to tell Sam about how big the country is, about the way the road looks at midnight with no one else on it. He wants to tell Sam how small it is inside the car, so that he feels like the only soul in the world, slipping through the blackness.

But these are all things Sam knows, things he’s given up. 

As always, he wants to tell Sam that he misses him. 

He lets Sam hang up this time. 

He doesn’t think he’ll be calling Sam again anytime soon. He doesn’t think Sam will mind. 

~~~~

He keeps buying new translations of the Odyssey. Not in every town, and not after every case, just whenever he’s missing Sam more than usual. 

Sam actually worked in a used bookstore, for a couple months while they were staying in the Twin Cities area. Dean would come in after he got off work and just lean on the counter and spend a couple of hours annoying Sam.

The owner- a plump, pleasant middle-aged woman- had caught him by the elbow one day just as he’d come inside and given him a wide smile.

“I know Sam would just blush if I mentioned it,” she said, “but I think it’s the cutest thing that you visit your boyfriend every day.”

She let go of Dean immediately after saying that and tottered off, leaving Dean gaping after her, too shocked to correct her.

Later, he wondered why Sam had never bothered to tell her Dean was his brother. 

Now, every time he’s in a used bookstore, he heads straight to the Classics section. It’s automatic. There are always a couple copies of the Odyssey. Dean’s grateful for it, but he’s never quite understood how you could discard something so easily. You’re only ever given so much; you should cling to it. Maybe he’s just bitter though; everything he’s ever tried to hold onto has been torn away. 

Dean has a whole shoebox full of Odysseys. He keeps the box in the back, not hidden with the guns and weapons, but on top with his duffel bag. Clothes and a car and seven copies of the Odyssey, the only normal things he owns. He doesn’t even read all of them anymore, just a hundred pages or so to get the sense of how the translation differs. He’s amazed to see how one story can be told so many different ways. 

Peter O’Toole, however, sits on the passenger seat. He’ll occasionally turn off his music and shove in one of the O’Toole cassettes. He’s familiar enough with the story now that he can just tune in whenever. He has his favorite parts, has listened to Odysseus vanquish the suitors at least a dozen times, but he finds he doesn’t mind wherever the story picks up.

It’s a simple story, really. Odysseus is just a man who wants to get home. 

v. how he is triumphant

New Orleans is deserted. It’s only been a week or two since the hurricane hit.

He slips into the French Quarter more easily than he should, does it while the sky is black and the water is blacker, no moon overhead. Dean keeps a steady hold on his shotgun. Ghosts keep flickering in and out of sight. A young girl. An old man. A woman with blood down her face and chest, her blouse ripped open, hands raised imploringly. She doesn’t just disappear like the others do, but lurches toward Dean, voice howling to match the wind. 

He shoots her. There’s a blast of noise and salt and then she’s gone.

The silence that follows is even deeper, a calm, considering kind of silence. Then the world seems to explode, everything billowing out at once. Dean collapses to his knees, and puts his hands over his ears, dropping his shotgun in the process. It sounds as if the world is shrieking, feels like the earth is bucking and shuddering beneath him. But nothing is happening. Nothing physical at least.

The ghosts flicker in even faster, layering over each other in a ghoulish collage. Dozens of them, and they don’t go away. There’s more than Dean’s ever seen in one place, maybe more than all the ghosts he’s seen his entire life. It’s too much spiritual energy, packed together too tight, and reality twists because of it.

He hears a voice, a deep woman’s voice shouting in a language he doesn’t understand- which is really any language that isn’t English or a smattering of Latin. The ghosts begin to disappear, first one at a time, and then in pairs, and finally in groups, until none of them are left. 

Dean’s still on his knees, and when he looks up, he sees a woman coming towards him. She’s tall. When he stands, it’s obvious that she’s almost as tall as he is, and her hair is flyaway and silver. 

“Dean Winchester,” she says in a deep, somber voice. “That was a very stupid thing to do.” 

“How do you know who I am?” he demands, picking up his shotgun. 

She gives him a long, amused look. It makes him uncomfortable, an intensity to the gaze that feels like the worst kind of scrutiny, as if she could read his thoughts like words inscribed on stone. 

“Because your father is a very stupid man as well, and that is exactly the kind of thing he would try to do.”

“You must be Madame Augustine,” says Dean, the reason he’s here. John called him a few days earlier to say, hurricane or no hurricane, he needed Dean to find her. 

She inclines her head gravely. “I am,” she says. “Your father send you?

“He did,” acknowledges Dean. Augustine gives him another long look, and Dean realizes that she’s blind. Her eyes are cobweb pale, no hint of a pupil anywhere. It makes it seem even more likely that she actually is looking inside his head. 

“Well, come along then,” she says with an exasperated sigh. She turns around; Dean has no choice but to follow. They walk down the road to a narrow house, kudzu covered and set back from the street. 

“This is Dean Winchester,” she announces to the house as they enter. There are two people inside it, a woman of about thirty and a young girl. They’re seated at a table, bent over a box of crayons and some paper, a candle flickering at the woman’s elbow. 

“This is my daughter, Eliza,” says Augustine. “And that is her daughter, Amelie.”

Dean nods at both of them. Amelie’s a child of four or five, and she looks away when Dean smiles at her. 

“She’s shy,” says Eliza, apologizing for the girl. “It’s good to meet you Dean.”

“She’s also up late,” sniffs Augustine. And for a moment, Dean is able to see her as a grandmother and not a scary-eyed psychic his father has sent him to speak with. 

“She couldn’t sleep, Mama,” says Eliza, wrapping a protective arm around her daughter. “There are too many ghosts around.”

“She’ll have to learn to be less sensitive,” reprimands Augustine, “if she’s to follow in my footsteps.”

Dean feels like maybe he’s been forgotten, pushed aside by the family drama. But Augustine turns briskly on heel to face him. “Follow me,” she orders, walking past him and into the next room. Dean just catches the scowl Eliza levels at her mother’s back as he turns to follow. 

The second room is almost pitch-black. Dean hears the familiar snap of a match, and a light flares up in Madame Augustine's palm, then gets transferred to a long white taper. 

“Your father wants you to ask me something,” she says calmly. 

Dean shifts uneasily. The light of the candle is just enough to illuminate them both, and darkness presses in at all sides, flickering like black tongues at the edge of the light. It makes him feel claustrophobic. 

“Yeah,” says Dean. “But he didn’t tell me what. He just said you’d know.”

Augustine tilts her head at him, a birdlike gesture. She places the taper on the edge of what looks like a shrine, the kind people keep in their houses to remember dead relatives by. 

“Your father always was an unhelpful man,” she mutters humorlessly. She busies herself over the shrine. A few more candles flare up. Something burns, the scent of the smoke sharp and acrid.

She speaks in the same language as she did by the car, her voice deep and sonorous. Dean shivers with awareness of something. There’s a crack of light and sound. Augustine shouts, and then, nothing. 

Madame Augustine steps away from the shrine. 

“Hmm,” she says, drawing out the syllable. She turns to face him and stands silently for a moment, giving every indication that she’s studying his face despite her blindness. She gestures suddenly at the amulet on his chest. “Your amulet. May I see it?” 

“Um,” says Dean. He grips his amulet protectively, and then lets go. It swings back to rest against his chest, the weight warm and familiar. “I guess,” he says warily. “I’m not taking it off though.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to,” answers Augustine, almost sweet. She plucks the amulet off his chest with a frail hand and closes her eyes. 

“Your brother gave this to you, didn’t he?” she asks after a moment.

“Yeah,” says Dean gruffly. “When we were kids. It was a long time ago.”

“Word of advice, Dean. Never accept a gift,” says Madame Augustine, opening her eyes. “A gift means a person has power over you.”

He has to laugh at the implication that all Sam’s power over him comes from the amulet. She thumps him on the chest in response, two knuckles a sharp rap against his collarbone.

“Don’t laugh, Dean,” she orders. “You and your brother are more tangled up in each other than either of you know.” She frowns at him some more. “There are things I could tell you,” she says, “but it doesn’t seem like you’d believe me.”

She turns away, striding back toward her daughter and grand-daughter.

“That’s fine by me,” Dean says agreeably, “but the old man’s not going to be happy with that. He wanted-”

Madame Augustine whirls on him, looking like she’s grown a foot in height. 

“I know what your father wants, Dean Winchester,” she booms. “And you tell him I don’t know anything. You tell him if he keeps this quest of his up, it’s gonna end with the both of you in Hell.”

Dean takes a step back instinctively, and Augustine shrinks back to a normal size. She touches her throat gently, expression troubled. 

“That’s all,” she says quietly but firmly, “That’s all I’m gonna say on the matter of your father.” Her eyes flash as she looks up at him. “But you tell him that means our balance is even.”

The walk back to the car is silent, even though Eliza and Amelie come with them this time. Amelie looks troubled, and Dean wonders about the girl following in Augustine’s footsteps. It seems like a heavy destiny for a small child. 

They stop about twenty feet from his car, the water murmuring softly in the background.

“You remember what I told you,” says Augustine firmly, her mouth set in a grim line.

“Drive safe,” says Eliza with a soft smile. 

Amelie doesn’t say anything at all, just regards him solemnly. 

“Well, um, thanks,” says Dean tentatively. He gives them all a nod and turns away. Something doesn’t quite feel right though. The sense of static has returned. The temperature has dropped.

Ghost, he thinks, and he turns- just in time to watch one flicker into existence in front of the women. Augustine raises a hand, looking almost bored. But the ghost is quick. It swoops forward, and disappears into the water. 

It drags Amelie in with it. 

Eliza screams; Dean doesn’t even think. He dives. The water envelops him almost silently. It’s impossible to see anything, the water too dark and too murky. So he closes his eyes and stretches his hands out, swims forward because there’s nothing else he can do. 

His fingers brush against something and he clenches his hand around it. It’s cloth he realizes, and his knuckles bump against something soft and dense. Amelie. He pulls the girl into his arms and kicks upward, surfaces with a gasp. She’s limp against him and he wills her to breathe as he swims back. Eliza snatches Amelie away from him as soon as he gets close enough and lays her down on the warped cobblestones. Dean pulls himself out of the water a second later, and Eliza wails, a sharp, high sound that pierces his chest.

“She’s not breathing!” she cries. Madame Augustine grips her shoulder tightly.

“Hush,” she says sharply. “Let Dean see.”

Dean kneels next to the girl. Eliza’s right. Amelie’s not breathing. But he’s known CPR since he was ten, when John threw a six year old Sam into a motel pool reeking with chlorine, on the expectation that Sam would flail around and learn to swim. 

Sam sank. And Dean dove after, dragged his brother to the surface. 

It was the first time he was ever truly furious at his father. John explained CPR to him afterwards, a kind of apology. If Dean ever needed to save Sam, he’d know how.

Amelie jerks up suddenly, after about thirty seconds of chest compressions, spitting water from her mouth. She coughs, a deep throat cough, coughs until she’s crying. And then she sits up fully and looks up at Dean. 

She breathes. 

“God!” cries Eliza, shouldering past Dean to embrace her daughter. Dean shuffles aside and stands up. Augustine is watching him with her unsettling silver eyes. 

“You’ve saved my granddaughter’s life Dean,” she says. “That’s a gift.”

“So what’s my present?” asks Dean. “A kiss?”

Augustine snorts. “Please,” she says. “I was kissing prettier boys than you long before your father was even born. No.” She gazes at him somberly. “I’m giving you the gift of prophecy.” She raps him on the chest, but more gently than she did before. “So pay attention. You’re going home soon, Dean. Remember that.” Dean opens his mouth to protest- he doesn’t have a home- unless you count the Impala. Even he could tell you he was headed back to her pretty soon. 

“Shush,” says Augustine, cutting him off. “The second thing you need to remember is, at some point, you and your brother are both gonna be asked to make a choice. There’s only one right answer. Make sure the two of you pick the right one- the same one.”

They’re both fortune cookie vague, unhelpful enough that Dean begins to doubt this whole exercise. He’s pretty sure Madame Augustine is crazy, but up until now, he was also pretty sure she was actually psychic.

She smiles gently at him.

“You don’t believe me,” she says. “But that’s two gifts I’ve just given you. It’s up to you how you use them.”

“That means I’m down one,” says Dean. He’s not sure he likes this continual balance sheet Augustine has running in her head. It reminds him too much of the way he and Sam used to run prank wars. “I don’t have anything to give,” he says honestly. “Unless you want a gun. But considering what you just survived I really don’t think you need one.”

“People are entirely different creatures from hurricanes,” says Augustine coolly. “But you’re right. I don’t. Gifts don’t need to be of value, though,” she adds. “Just of value to yourself.”

Dean thinks about it. He knows she’s asking after his amulet, drawn to whatever mystic power it’s never been able to manifest. Sam told him ages ago that it was, ‘real special.’ But it’s also the one thing in the world he’s not willing to give up. 

“I’ll be back in a moment,” he promises. He walks to the Impala and pulls open the passenger door. The gift is in the front seat. He walks back a little more slowly, the box feeling unusually heavy in his hands.

“Here,” he says, pressing the audio book into Augustine’s palms. She takes it with a curious expression. “It’s a recording of the Odyssey,” he explains. “I figure since you’re, you know…”

Dean trails off, and Augustine breaks into a wide smile, the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth deepening. 

“Clever boy,” she says, still smiling. “I know this is one more thing you won’t believe, but you’re a better man than your father.”

Dean shakes his head, but he thanks her all the same.

It almost feels like he’s been released from a spell. He digs through his box of cassettes once he gets back to the car, finds Zeppelin IV. He figures next town he stops in with a used bookstore, he’ll be dropping some things off. 

He sticks Zeppelin IV into the cassette player, but doesn’t press play. He calls John first, doesn’t really expect him to pick up, and isn’t surprised when the voicemail crackles through.

“I talked to Madame Augustine,” he says, driving through the deserted streets of the city. 

“She’s a little nuts. You know that, right? But she said she couldn’t help you with whatever it was you wanted.” He pauses, not entirely sure what to say after that. He considers tacking on the part about whatever John’s doing ending badly, but he’s not sure he believes her. He knows John won’t. “See you in a couple days,” is all he adds, and he hangs up.

Dean knows John’s working a case in Jericho. So once he makes it out of the city, he turns the car west, towards California. 

He can’t help but think Sam after that. California. Sam. 

And then, he can’t help but think _home_.

He presses play.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to my two fabulous betas, locknkey and cherie_morte, without whom this would be a much poorer fic. Thanks as well to scorpiod1 for pushing me through this and to familiardevil for the hand-holding. 
> 
> Finally, a huge thank you to glasshouses, who purchased this fic from me at help_haiti. I hope you enjoy.
> 
> All lines from the Odyssey taken from the Robert Fitzgerald translation, aka the translation I stole from my parents when I left for college. Also, as far as I know, no Peter O'Toole recording of the Odyssey actually exists. But apparently an Ian McKellan audio book _does_!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] Odysseus, American: written by coyotesuspect | read by cosmonaught](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4182948) by [cosmonaught](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmonaught/pseuds/cosmonaught)




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